week 1:HOW-TO GUIDES

How to win friends and influence people, how to write an autobiographical novel, how to be perfect, how to be an other woman. What are the things that only you know how to do? We will read the esoteric literary instructions of writers like Lorrie Moore, May-Lan Tan & Ron Padgett, as well as excerpts from the best-selling 1930s self-help guide by Dale Carnegie, and investigate the possibilities for using the how-to format in our own work, with a focus on local, emotional, and personal instructions.

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week 2: CELEBRITY PROFILES

What ever happened to those long form features on random famous people you used to read in the old magazines lying around the dentist’s waiting room? We’re going to read some outstanding examples of this somewhat outdated genre. Gay Talese on Frank Sinatra in a 1963 issue of Esquire. Kathy Acker asking the Spice Girls about feminism in 1997. Truman Capote’s cutting Observations on writers like Somerset Maugham and Ezra Pound in his coffee-table book with Richard Avedon... What can we learn about other people just by observing them? And how much fun can we have trying to tell the story of someone else’s life? 

 

week 3: CREATIVE EULOGIES

 

There’s potential for this subject to get depressing, but let’s think of it as a celebration of life. We’re going to remember items of clothing we lost, favourite bars that closed down, bedrooms we used to sleep in, people we once knew but don’t talk to anymore. We’ll read innovative obituaries for writers and artists we lost too soon, and talk about the tiny details that make up life itself. We’ll consider the power of language in the face of loss, and write in remembrance of some little things past.

 

week 4: MUSIC WRITING

 

I’ll be honest, I’m putting this one in here because we had such a great time doing Travel Writing and Food Writing in the previous sessions of Zine Club. These topics are fundamental to the human experience and we all have something to share about them. We’ll read writing inspired by music and listen to music inspired by literature, discuss our favourite lyricists and the soundtracks to our lives. And then, of course, we’ll write about it.

 

week 5: OPINION PIECES

 

From my perspective, in my opinion, as far as I’m concerned, it seems to me that, in my experience, personally I can’t think of anything worse than writing an opinion piece, but that’s sort of what makes it a fun topic. We’ll read opinion writing on a range of trivial and not so trivial topics, question what possesses a writer to share their views publicly, consider how quickly certain viewpoints can fall in or out of fashion, and experiment with the form for our own imaginative purposes.

 

week 6: COVER DESIGN & LAYOUT

 

We’ll consider the visual elements of zines. What should (and could) your project actually look like? And how can we make that happen? We’ll look at zines, journals and books past and present to give us inspiration for the interior layout, and spend some time thinking, talking and playing around with cover design. Zine party!